Week 2 of Getting Up Early: A Minor Setback

My weekend was a lot of fun thanks to my sister and her boyfriend’s visit. We went snowshoeing, ate yummy food, and stayed up late. That made getting up Monday morning particularly difficult, though I did get up. I stumbled out of bed and found myself in the shower instead of exercising…oops!I was running late anyway, so I decided to just head out to the coffee shop and plan. SXSW is around the corner, and on Tuesday I’m heading into Newton to visit some people, so I was preoccupied with travel planning. Travel tends to put me into an obsessive “prepare of die” state of mind; I think it probably has to do with my childhood, as I was living in a place where I couldn’t speak or read the language (Chinese). To go anywhere, I had to memorize landmarks and routes for safe passage on buses. I had a limited vocabulary of phrases that I could use to indicate emergencies like “where is the bathroom” or “I need to go to this address” for taxis, and hope that I wouldn’t get robbed or kidnapped or something horrible like that. Anyway, these days when I travel I tend to fall back into the same rhythm, triple- and quadruple-checking reservations, roads, landmarks, and so forth. It’s an ingrained habit at this point.

For most of the day, I’ve been off my rhythm. First of all, I was tired, and found it difficult to focus on anything. I spent most of the day just gathering materials for projects and making calls, which was about what I could manage. I ended up taking a long, coma-like nap in the middle of the day, strangely drained. This might be the backlash that readers were warning me about yesterday, or it is just the weekend catching up with me. Something is telling me that this will be a hard week because the novelty of waking up early has worn off, and if I’m going to quit it will be this week. Having said that, I don’t want this to happen. An additional complication will be that I’m flying out to SXSW next week, and it’s going to be a crazy schedule. Hoo.

The focus of this week will be to establishing consistency in waking up in the morning. If there’s anything I do, I think it should be that. And hopefully, the rest will follow.